An OutKast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South

OutKast, the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo formed in 1992, is one of the most influential musical groups within American popular culture of the past twenty-five years. Through Grammy-winning albums, music videos, feature films, theatrical performances, and fashion, André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton have articulated a vision of postmodern, post-civil rights southern identity that combines the roots of funk, psychedelia, haute couture, R&B, faith and spirituality, and Afrofuturism into a style all its own.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin.

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina

Recentering the development of industrially scaled Southern pottery traditions around enslaved and free Black potters working in the mid-nineteenth century, this catalogue presents groundbreaking scholarship and new perspectives on stoneware made in and around Edgefield, South Carolina. Among the remarkable works included are a selection of regional face vessels as well as masterpieces by enslaved potter and poet David Drake, who signed, dated, and incised verses on many of his jars, even though literacy among enslaved people was criminalized at the time.

Juneteenth Rodeo

In Juneteenth Rodeo, Bird’s lens celebrates a world that was undervalued at the time, capturing everything, from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk. Essays by Bird and sports historian Demetrius Pearson reclaim the crucial role of Black Americans in the Western US and show modern rodeo riders—who still compete on today’s circuit—as “descendants” in a more than two-hundred-year lineage of Black cowboys.

Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry

In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they laid the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century.

African American Almanac: 400 Years of Triumph, Courage and Excellence

This almanac is devoted to illustrating and demystifying the moving, difficult, and often lost history of black life in America. A legacy of pride, struggle, and triumph spanning more than 400 years is presented through a mix of biographies (including 500 influential figures), little-known or misunderstood historical facts, enlightening essays on significant legislation and movements, and 150 rare photographs and illustrations.

A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South

The world they inherited -- "Moving like a whirlwind" : Lucy Craft Laney, activist educator -- "The best secondary school in Georgia" : building the Haines Institute culture -- "Ringing up a school" : Mary McLeod Bethune's impact on Daytona Beach -- "Show some daylight between you" : Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the schooling experience of Memorial Palmer Institute graduates, 1948-1958 -- "Telling some mighty truths" : Nannie Helen Burroughs, activist educator and social critic -- "The masses and the classes" : women's friendships and support networks among school founders -- Passing into hi

Voices of Black South Carolina: Legend & Legacy

Did you know that eighty-eight years before Rosa Parks's historic protest, a courageous black woman in Charleston kept her seat on a segregated streetcar? What about Robert Smalls, who steered a Confederate warship into Union waters, freeing himself and some of his family, and later served in the South Carolina state legislature? In this inspiring collection, historian Damon L. Fordham relates story after story of notable black South Carolinians, many of whose contributions to the state's history have not been brought to light until now.